This pre-event is aimed at outlining a new approach to digital policy development that the Just Net Coalition, its members, and its partners, are pioneering. Here, we propose shifting the loci of policy development shifts from rarefied and somewhat technicalised horizontal spaces to sectors/ areas that are directly impacted by digitalisation including – health, media, education, commerce, agriculture, gender, and more. It is through creative interactions between horizontal specialized digital policy-making spaces and institutions, and digital thinking emerging from the impacted sectors that we believe appropriate policies and governance for the digital can emerge.

Data governance is an example of this. Health data is quite different from e-commerce data which is different from agriculture and environment data. It is thus difficult to make cross-cutting data governance policies without connecting back to data-related perspectives arising from all these sectors.

The workshop will therefore bring actors from diverse sectors such as environment, agriculture, health, media and democracy, trade, commerce, gender, finance, who are engaging with digital developments in their respective areas, to interact with digital policy actors and explore how society-wide digital polices can best be developed and implemented.

Among the IGF’s main topics, this event will connect to “Economic and social inclusion and human rights.”

Among the merging and cross-cutting issues, the best connection is to Emerging regulation: market structure, content, data, and consumer rights regulation”

The key policy questions that we will address include

1. How do digital policies relate to human rights in every impacted sector, as seen and assessed from within that sector?

2. How can all stakeholders from every sector have a full voice in digital policymaking?

3. In post-pandemic re-construction, where new digitalized structures will have a major part, how can appropriate sector-perspective informed policies, regulations, and programs be defined?

4. How can there be cross-learning among sectors in terms of dealing with the new challenges of the digital?

5. How can areas like data governance, platform governance, and AI governance be informed by the needs, norms, and perspectives of sectors that are/will be impacted by these new society wide governance paradigms and systems?

We will aim to get engaged participation through actively reaching out on our mailing lists and networks and social media in the time leading up to IGF. We will also live-blog and tweet the proceedings of the workshop to allow outreach beyond the formal online venues of the IGF.